The voice mail recently made the rounds again after Montagueshared this chapter of his book, discussing that time period. Speaking on the matter on the podcast, he said of how the message leaked online:

“I never got a straight answer out of this, we didn’t put it on any of the records because we didn’t want to date the record. And we’re pretty sure that our manager have leaked it—at least online.”

“I think we always kind of viewed it as both a positive and a negative. I mean it would have been best if we didn’t have tick him off, but… to some degree no press is bad press they say. It definitely got people’s attention and a lot of people… Once the masses started turning on Fred for whatever reason, that almost kind of… There were definitely some radio stations that were saying ‘Hey we don’t like Limp Bizkit anymore, so we’re gonna play Taproot in place of where we used to play Limp Bizkit.’ So in that regard it worked out for us.”

When asked if the band had any regrets about not going with Fred Durst:

“I guess I’ll just speak for myself on it—I think all the guys probably would agree. We definitely always made decisions that we felt were in the interest of keeping what we thought the integrity of the band should be and that we didn’t want to be a band that just trying to make a hit song or something.

We even met with [producer] Howard Benson for the second record, so he’d just come off the big P.O.D. record and he did the Flyleaf record. So he was kind of known for taking these bands and making them hit songs.

And he straight up told us: ‘Hey if you want hits you should record a record with me. If you don’t want hits then I don’t want to work with you.’ And we were like OK, we’re not about that, we’re not trying to make hits.

I think that’s probably more along the lines of where our relationship with Fred would have gone. Even talking to Aaron Lewis, [of Staind] I did finally get the guts to ask him on tour: ‘Hey did Fred ever talk about us? Is there any bad blood there?’ And he said: ‘Nah he is who he is, he does his thing, you know.’

I guess the thing I definitely don’t regret about not signing with Fred was that, if you signed to… If we would have signed to his imprint, which was I think was Flip on Interscope, then Flip would always have a piece of that action.

The way I understanded it was that it may have been an additional piece to what the Interscope piece would have done. I think that we definitely had a little more autonomy by not going with him. And I think that at least we’re kind of proud that we’re able to stick to our guns in that regard.”

He later added that he didn’t have any “ill will” towards Durst or Limp Bizkit, despite how things turned out. You can check out the rest of the podcast, which finds him discussing the Taproot‘s early days, touring on ‘Ozzfest‘ and more here.